Woodlands Junior School is thirty minutes from Rye across the county line in the Garden of England. It is the only primary school in England with three top Ofsted commendations. The school's website gives 25 000 visitors a day a glimpse of life in England through the eyes of its students. My comments on population came from here so by way of a thank you I left my grubby digits in their visitors’ book. Here is what I wrote.

While searching the internet with Google for some basic population numbers I chanced across your website and found it to be the only one to offer me what I needed and to present it in a way I could use for my weblog. How about having some fun projecting future populations based on different birth rates...and as you are so close to Dover why not base your future figures on different immigration and emigration rates too?

For good measure I threw in some facts. In Europe 2.1 is considered to be the population replacement level. In other parts of the world this figure is much higher as it needs to cover babies who never make it past their fifth birthday...often half of them...and for mothers dying in child birth...quite apart from Aids which takes less than one in a thousand of the English population (60 000 were HIV positive at the last count). The current birth rate in the UK is 1.74 children per woman but the Greeks will disappear soon at just 1.29. Here are some others: Spain & Italy 1.3, Germany 1.4, Holland 1.7, Norway & Sweden 1.8 and Ireland & France 2.0.

Today I emailed Constanza in Mexico City and suggested that Pensart arrange sponsorship for Woodland’s English cultural pages. Her husband Peter Dale read Spanish Literature at Oxford University so I thought the Woodlands culture pages might give themselves a multicultural flavour. Mexico City cricket results that sort of thing. I wonder what silly point is in Spanish? I also floated the idea that Gimnasio Jose Joaquim Casas might go for some English/Spanish twinning with Woodlands Junior School and their Kent colleagues.

Constanza had emailed me the latest Wheelock College newsletter. Headlined were the glad tidings that this Boston-based college had received half a million dollars in new funding from the US federal government. Well jolly hockey sticks and whack-o to all that! But I raised my eyebrows when I read the small print. It seems that in December, George Dubya Bush signed legislation that included funding for Wheelock College as part of NASA’s 2006 budget. This funding ‘builds on the college’s work with the NASA Opportunities for Visionary Academics Programme (NOVA) which seeks to create unique opportunities for elementary teacher preparation emphasizing maths and science.

Apparently Wheelock College plans to use the money ‘to improve classroom technology, enhance math and science teaching labs, and develop new cutting-edge curricula for educating elementary-level teachers.’ Like what? Neurolingistic Programming? An updated version of the programmes Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were working on at Harvard University a few decades back? Or something more mundane like computer freebies from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs or wind-up laptops from Nicholas Negroponte at MIT just down the road?

The Gospel According to Forbes has Roman Abramovich at 363 in its rich list for 2001, 127 in 2002 and up to 49 in 2003...one of 17 Russian billionaires. America tops the list with 275 billionaires with Bill Gates in the top spot on 490 billion dollars. Our poor little Security Council misfit France does not fare so well with just ten...one less than Mexico, the home of the widowed Carlos Slim Helu and his six children.

Now if you are talking eligible they don’t come much more eligible than the richest man in South America with 14 billion dollars to his name and to those of his nominee companies, family trusts and offshore accounts. His prospects are good too with his wealth up $5 billion on the year thanks to windfall profits and stock surges from his flagship Téléfonos de México...a landline monopoly notorious for undercutting the competition...and his América Msvil telcos. Slim is a vocal opponent of free trade and free market prescriptions for developing Latin economies. Now there’s a surprise. Echoes of Richard Branson. Are there limits to hypocrisy?

Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich have one thing in common...giving away half a billion dollars. Nobody knows the source of the Abramovich billions...oil, share deals etc. But Bill Gates’ billions came from keeping his source code secret. Our superheroes have different ideas on spending money. Gates’ millions pay for global wars on malaria and tuberculosis. Abramovich’s dosh buys foreign footballers for Chelsea Football Club.

Now let’s say that upon my demise I get the job of membership secretary at The Pearly Gates. One day I see Abramovich and Gates floating up the drive. My immediate boss St. Peter wants my advice...and he wants it now. For Peter it helps to keep it simple so I rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. My criteria? How much happiness they bring into the world. Not an easy call. I’ve been a Chelsea fan all my life. But fortunately ‘now’ in heavenly terms is much the same as eternity. I tell Peter I’ll get back to him on this one!